With the development of network technology and the convergence between telecommunication networks and the Internet, services in the telecommunication networks increase rapidly, giving rise to huge service subscription demands of users. Especially, as the relationships between existing services become more and more complicated, various related services have emerged, and the users have urgent demands for subscription and management of the related services. When a user needs a certain type of service, the user interacts with a service provider through a terminal device such as a cell phone or a telephone to subscribe to the service. The type of the service includes conventional telecommunication services such as monthly package and short message package and other non-communication services such as hotel reservation, weather query, and stock information. The service provider may be a telecommunication operator or a professional service provider. In the existing communication services, a large amount of service data of user applied services is accumulated. The habits and characteristics of the users in using the telecommunication services are specifically recorded in the data. With a detailed analysis, some characteristics of the users' consumption may be obtained, so that more customized services may be provided for the users, and scientific foundations may be provided for management decisions of the operators and service providers. The related services indicate some kind of relation between independent services. Such a relation may be in terms of user habits, hobbies, and the like. For example, a user usually subscribes to a cell-phone news service and an online music service together. The services themselves may also be specifically related. For example, the subscription to an airline ticket reservation service is usually followed by the subscription to a hotel reservation service.
When a certain service is needed, the user sends a service subscription request to a service subscription server through a client. The service subscription server responds to the subscription request, completes a service subscription operation, and returns a subscription result to the client. When the user has successfully subscribed to the service, in order to promote other services, the operator and service provider usually recommend some related services to the user. The recommendation method includes sending a service advertisement message to the user, sending a service recommendation message after the user subscribes to a service, and the like. A common method for related-service recommendation is that, a service server or a subscription management server recommends a set of related services immediately after the user successfully requests to subscribe to a service, for example, sending a recommendation short message, e-mail, or the like to the user. The user may restart a new subscription request depending on the recommended services, and subscribe to the recommended related services to the subscription management server.
Generally, a service subscription process with a service recommendation function in the conventional art is shown in FIG. 1.
In Step 201, a device sends a service registration request A to a service-subscription management system that the device belongs to.
In Step 202, the service-subscription management system sends a subscription request to a service server (AS1).
In Step 203, the service server (AS1) returns a subscription result A to the service-subscription management system.
In Step 204, the service-subscription management system returns the subscription result A to a terminal.
In Step 205, the service-subscription management system notifies a service match server of the service subscription result.
In Step 206, the service match server determines whether a service A has related services or not.
In Step 207, the service match server sends a recommendation message (service B, C, or D) to the terminal.
In Step 208, the terminal sends a subscription request (service B or D).
In Step 209, the service-subscription management system sends a registration request (service B or D) to a service server (AS2).
In Step 210, the service server (AS2) returns a subscription result to the service-subscription management system.
In Step 211, the service-subscription management system returns the subscription result to the user device.
Based on the conventional art described above, the inventor found in the implementation process that the following problems may occur during actual service subscription.
Firstly, the interaction process of related-service subscription is complicated, resulting in waste of system resources. When a subscriber subscribes to a service, the subscription management server completes the currently requested subscription, then generates recommended services for the subscriber according to a user profile of the subscriber and information about the service requested to be subscribed to currently, and sends the recommended services to the subscriber. If the subscriber accepts the services recommended by the subscription management server, the subscriber needs to perform a service subscription operation again to complete the subscription to the recommended services. Particularly, when a large number of recommended services are needed, the user has to perform the subscription request operation many times. Therefore, the subscription scheme in the conventional art is rather inconvenient to operate, and plenty of system resources are consumed. Secondly, the probability of related-service subscription is low. After viewing a message indicating that the subscription to a service is successful, the user usually pays little attention to or even ignores the subsequent subscription introduction of other services, resulting in a low possibility for the recommended services to be subscribed to. Moreover, the usability is poor and the customized demands of the users are unable to be satisfied. Currently, an improved method of service recommendation by using predefined relating rules may be applied to simplify the related-service subscription to a certain extent. However, as the related services are predefined, the related services may only be services like the preset service packages. Besides, the types of the related services are fixed, and the related services cannot be customized for the users, resulting in poor usability. Once the user subscribes to any of the related services, the subscription server automatically subscribes to all the related services for the user, despite the fact that the user may only need a part of the services, and is not willing to subscribe to all the services. Thereby, the freedom of the user in service subscription is decreased.